| The integrated manufacturing enterprise philosophy, IME henceforth, has become one of the most strategic options available to industry to challenge domestic and international competition. This new philosophy embraces a wide range of manufacturing aspects, from customer enquiry to product delivery and considers all the business functions of an enterprise. Successful implementation of IME requires concurrent analysis of complex internal and external variables. Therefore, a new generation of decision-making models becomes a must. This dissertation addresses the development of a simple but powerful dynamic decision framework for assessing managers in strategic planning in an IME environment.; The proposed dynamic model takes into consideration the history of the enterprise and its actual conditions in order to predict and to control future behavior. The model presents information at a level of abstraction that can capture the intricacies of an IME, as well as deliver an understandable and measurable performance of the enterprise. The selected enterprise performance measures are market share, production index, capacity index, and quality index.; The principles for formulating the dynamic decision model are adapted from system theory, and the mathematical methodology is from modern control theory. A qualitative description of an enterprise was a preliminary and an indispensable step to the development of the dynamic equations and control algorithms of the enterprise; then, a theoretical hybrid model for a small-sized enterprise emerged.; The proposed algorithm for decision-making in an IME is developed in the discrete-time domain. The model is validated by a computer simulation, and three scenarios are discussed. Each scenario presents a production control algorithm, which captures a specific operations management approach, and a marketing and product development strategy. These scenarios are linked by interconnecting dynamic equations.; Results indicate that the control schemes exhibit a hierarchical form that seems very likeable to actual implementation in an enterprise. The algorithms have the important property of guarantee performance, which means that all variables must remain nonnegative. This issue was also demonstrated mathematically by Lyapunov's direct method. The calculated indices of the enterprise are highly significant indicators of the performance of an IME.; The overall analysis of the theoretical hybrid model and the dynamic decision model for an IME give additional insights for future directions in this subject. |
